25 centimes - Roche-Maurice

Roche-Maurice was one of hundreds of French prisoner-of-war camps that issued their own fractional scrip during the First World War, a practical necessity given the near-total withdrawal of small change from civilian circulation after August 1914. Camp-issued notes like this one functioned as closed-economy tokens — valid only within the camp's canteen or internal trading system, and worthless the moment a prisoner was transferred or repatriated.

French POW camp scrip from this period is systematically undercatalogued. Many issues survive in tiny quantities because the camps themselves destroyed remaining stocks at the armistice, and what circulated was often reduced to pulp by four years of handling in damp, overcrowded conditions.